Tuesday, 31 October 2006

That little black bag you see there in the foreground is TWO weeks rubbish for us -- that's right, I forgot to put out the trash last week... How do we do it? We try to avoid buying things with unncessary packaging. We recycle a lot. We compost a lot. The council provides us with a supply of black bags once a year -- enough black bags to put out two a week. We put out less than one a week and are currently amassing quite a stash of black bags!

There was an article in the news the other week about a council that wanted to monitor how much people were throwing away and charge them accordingly -- we are all in favour of this -- we could save a fortune!

Tuesday, 17 October 2006

What are these eggs doing in the hedge? People had warned us that this would happen, and we have been lucky so far, but on Sunday Greg spotted these eggs in the hedge... And when we moved this hen...

...we found even more eggs...

We are now harvesting what I think will be the last of the harvest:

Greg made some yummy sausage rolls...

Have you ever wondered what dew looks like on a ewe? :)

Also, I've added a new link under the Useful Information section on the right -- this is a link to our nearest (geographically) web cam. It's about 20 miles from here, but it should generally give you a fairly accurate idea of what the weather outside our house is doing at the moment! :)

Monday, 16 October 2006

I know I am behind, and I have got some pictures that I will post up as soon as I get a chance, but in the meantime I wanted to bring to your attention this article from yesterday's New York Times about the state of the food we are eating today. I thought it was very interesting and thought provoking. Have a look.

Wednesday, 4 October 2006

Tuesday, 3 October 2006

The task for this week is to move more wood down from the fields. It seems a never-ending task...

Last week we had a big rainstorm and I got up the following morning to find this poor little rosemary plant in the front garden -- where has its pot got to???

It has now been re-potted, but I'm going to take this opportunity to ask a rosemary question -- as you can see, some of the leaves are a sort of reddish-yellowish colour -- we seem to have difficulty making our rosemary thrive! Greg says this is down to not good enough drainage, but short of putting gravel in the bottoms of the pots, what else can I do?

Days are getting shorter and it is getting colder, but still lots of lovely fresh produce for salads every day...

We finally got the new strawberry beds planted -- check back next summer and see how many strawberries we get! We also still have lots of spare strawberry runners, so if you want some, you are more than welcome to come and collect...

The big oak tree is full of acorns (and so is the ground underneath it now!)

Some people say that this is a sign that we will have a cold winter; other people say it is a sign that we had a warm spring!